Upgrading from BeOS R5

I'm trying to upgrade from BeOS R5 to Haiku but I am having problems installing it.
I downloaded the raw image file and burned it to a disk through Windows 2000. However, the disk is only readable in BeOS. When I start BeOS and mount the CD to the desktop I see a bunch of files and stuff and I'm not sure as to how I'm suppose to install Haiku. I remember having the same problem with BeOS Max Edition v4 but I later on figured out that I had to use a floppy disk to boot from so that I could install BeOS Max Edition to the hard drive. However, there doesn't appear to be a bootable floppy disk image for the installation of Haiku on this site. If someone could help me I'd greatly appreciate it.

Since you already have the Haiku installation burnt on CD, it IMO opinion boils down to:
0. Boot BeOS
1. Create/initialize a BFS partition with DriveSetup
2. Mount your burnt CD and the newly created partition
3. Copy everything from the CD to the new partition
4. From Terminal: makebootable /[HaikuPartitionMountPoint]
5. From Terminal: bootman

Wow, there is actually going to be a live CD for Haiku? It seems like the development team has been taking forever to release an ISO file. Do you know if the Alpha LiveCD will allow you to perform a hard drive installation of Haiku? It might seem like a stupid question but I just had to ask.

The fantastic but small developer team had much more pressing issues on their plate for a long time. In the time of pre-alpha, Haiku was only really targeted at other devs interested to help coding. Actively coding pretty much demands building your own image from source.
Now Haiku is in a state to be shown a wider audience. An ISO image is now a much more convenient means of distribution. Although, a VM or RAW image has been available for years now, making it very easy to take a look via VMWare, VirtualBox and other virtual machines.

WRT your question (not stupid at all), the LiveCD will include an Installer that let's you install to an empty partition.

The instructions given by Humdinger are almost correct, more precisely they used to be correct, but after the directory structure of Haiku was altered some months ago (/boot/beos/system became /boot/system) point 4 and out need to be modified.

4.
a) Open the Terminal application and move into the root folder of the partition to where you copied the files from the Haiku image. If the mounted partition is called Haiku you would type:cd /Haiku
b) Recreate the old BeOS directory structure on the Haiku partition:mkdir -p beos/system
c) Copy the new boot loader file to the old location and give it the old name:cp system/haiku_loader beos/system/zbeos
d) [If this is a new partition that has not had Haiku or BeOS installed before]
Run in terminal:makebootable /Haiku (or whatever you have called the partition)
Note that this is the BeOS version of makebootable.

5.
Run bootman if necessary. You can also use Grub or others of course. (Remember that bootman will install to your MBR...)

6.
Boot into Haiku to check if it works. Although not strictly necessary you can opt to use the standard boot loader configuration for Haiku. To configure this go into the Terminal (while in Haiku) and type:makebootable /boot
After testing that this works by rebooting you can remove the beos folder and its content from your Haiku system.

PS: If you wish to update Haiku to new versions later on this is as easy as just deleting the old files on the partition and copying over new ones from a new Haiku image (from BeOS or another Haiku install). No need to do the boot loader procedure over again. Note that it's not possible to delete the Desktop folder and the Trash from the Haiku home folder, but the other content of the home folder can be replaced. Also you can't (and there is no need to) copy the /var folder from the image.

Thanks. I burned one of those images and was actually able to finally install Haiku.
However, I'd like to point out that when installing and whenever I boot Haiku I have to press the space bar before the screen goes blank and change the fail safe video mode to 640X480 in 16 bit mode to even get it to boot and display anything. If there a way to fix this?

yes, you have to select fail safe mode & the video mode ( both of these ). Use fail safe video mode tells Haiku to use the VESA driver. If you just select the video mode, it'll try to use another video driver.

The VESA driver supports higher resolutions. I use it myself because Intel video driver does not work for me in Haiku. I choose 1024x768x32. Unless, you have a video card with outdated VESA bios, you should be able to get higher resolutions too. Report bug if still a problem, http://dev.haiku-os.org

Could you also state video card chipset & model that you use & what resolution you get in Windows/Linux ( on your monitor )?

yes, you have to select fail safe mode & the video mode ( both of these ). Use fail safe video mode tells Haiku to use the VESA driver. If you just select the video mode, it'll try to use another video driver.

The VESA driver supports higher resolutions. I use it myself because Intel video driver does not work for me in Haiku.

If your graphics card is not supported/does not work, remove the driver (in your case, the intel_extreme driver, and Haiku will then boot automatically in VESA. That should save you from having to select fail safe video mode every time.

Unless you also select use fail safe (video) mode, you are actually just setting the Nvidia video driver to 640x480x16 resolution. If you're actually selecting fail safe video mode + 1024x768x16/32 & it does not work then maybe your video bios does not support it (I'd think it would )?

Your video card likely does not work well with the Nvidia video driver for one reason or another. You can also do a ls /dev/video & should see what drivers are loaded in there.